Privacy Policy

What you give us

To sign in: your email address, or your Google or Apple account if you use one of those buttons. With Apple you choose whether we see your real email or a private relay address, and Apple gives us your name the first time only.

In Foundation, the questions before your profile goes live: your legal name and surname, the name you want shown, your date of birth, gender and marital status; your phone number; the city and country you are searching from and the coordinates of that city; where you were born, your nationality and your background; your height, education, occupation, income band, languages, interests and how you would describe yourself; what you wrote about yourself.

About your deen and how you live: how often you pray, your level of practice, your Qur’an and Islamic learning, what you expect and observe around modesty, the school you follow, whether you were born Muslim or reverted, and your answers on smoking, alcohol, halal food, fitness and your living situation.

About marriage: whether you want children, whether you would relocate, who you are open to marrying, your household expectations, the values and traits you would value, and your intended timeline — how long a Suhba, how families are involved, when you would meet, when you would marry.

Your photographs, and the blurred copies made from them. If you take the live check, the single frame captured at the moment you blinked.

Know Yourself: what you write at each level, and which levels and talks you have finished.

In a Suhba: the messages you send, when they were read, and whether you are typing. If you invite a wali: the name and email address you give for your wali.

With iShaykh: what you write to iShaykh and what comes back.

With Ask Shaykh Rasoul: the questions you send him, and his answers and messages to you.

Your preferences: the age range and distance you are searching, your non-negotiables, and your privacy and notification switches.

If you buy Nikah Pro: from Apple or Google, which plan, its transaction number, when it renews or ends, and whether it was refunded. We never see your card or any other payment details.

If you tell us why you are cancelling Nikah Pro: the reason you chose, and anything you wrote with it.

To send you notifications: a notification token for your phone, and whether it is an iPhone or an Android phone.

What we work out ourselves

When you were last active, so a profile can say “active today” if you allow it, and so people who are active come first when suggestions are chosen. Nobody is shown the time.

Your 7-day clock: the day your first suggestions arrived, which sets when the places you have decided on are filled again.

A compatibility score for each suggestion, and the sentences explaining it. These are worked out on our server from your answers and theirs. No score is shown to the person it is about.

iShaykh’s notes: every few messages, iShaykh writes himself short private notes about you from your conversation, so he remembers what matters to you.

Your Match Credits: how many you have, and how you earned them.

Nothing is bought from data brokers, and nothing about you is inferred from anywhere outside this app.

Photos and faces

Before a photograph leaves your phone, the phone itself checks that it has a face in it, using Apple’s Vision on an iPhone and Google’s ML Kit on Android. Both run on the phone; nothing is sent anywhere for that check.

When you add a photograph, our face service looks at it to check that it shows one person and that the face is clear enough to recognise. To do that it turns the face into a set of numbers. Those numbers are used for that check and then thrown away.

If you take the live check, the frame is compared with your photograph in the same way. We keep the result — passed, needs a person to look, or failed — and how alike the two faces were, but not the numbers themselves.

If an account is banned for breaking our rules, we do keep the numbers for the faces in its photographs, along with scrambled fingerprints of its email addresses and phone number, so the same person cannot open a new account. None of these can be turned back into a photograph, an address or a number. A new photograph that matches a banned face is refused, and that account is banned too. If you believe this has happened to you by mistake, write to salam@nikah.app.

All of this runs on our own service, hosted on Railway. No face data is sent to an outside face-recognition company, and it is used for nothing except these checks.

Messages and safety

Suhba messages are kept in our own database. The two of you can read them while the Suhba is open. Once it ends neither of you can open them again, but they are kept, so that a report about what happened in it can still be looked into, until one of you deletes your account.

Every message is checked before it is sent, by rules running on our own server. No outside service and no AI reads it. A message with a phone number, an email address, a link, a social media name or handle, a card number, a request for money, sexual content or abuse is not sent. Milder words ask you to confirm before sending.

A message that is stopped is kept, with the reason, for our safety team to review. Three stopped messages within seven days pause your sending for 24 hours.

Our safety team cannot open Suhba conversations. Only the most senior level of our team can, and only to look into a report or a safety concern; each time is recorded, with the reason. The same applies to iShaykh conversations.

A Suhba conversation, and the other person’s profile opened from it, cannot be captured: a screenshot or screen recording of them comes out blank.

Notifications name who sent you a request, accepted yours or wrote to you, by first name. They never contain the text of a message.

The wali

If you invite a wali, we email your wali from salam@nikah.app with your first name, the other person’s first name and a private link. The link works only once the other person agrees.

Through it, without an account, he can read the messages sent in that Suhba from the moment he first opens it, and see both first names and the other person’s age and city. He never sees photographs or the rest of either profile.

The wali’s access ends when the Suhba ends, when either of you blocks the other, or when you withdraw the invitation.

iShaykh

iShaykh is an AI companion, run on OpenAI’s API. When you write to iShaykh, OpenAI receives your message, the recent conversation, and what he needs to answer you well: your first name; your answers about practice, prayer, values, non-negotiables and timeline; your Know Yourself answers; iShaykh’s notes about you; and how far along you are on the app.

In a conversation about a Suhba, OpenAI also receives the other person’s display name, their values and personality answers and some of their profile answers — never their photographs, date of birth, location, phone number, school or what they wrote about themselves.

He never sees your Suhba messages, is never shown to anybody else, and never writes into a Suhba. OpenAI does not use what it receives through its API to train its models.

Your conversation and iShaykh’s notes are kept until you clear them — Me › Settings › Data and matching consent › Clear what iShaykh remembers — or delete your account.

Ask Shaykh Rasoul

With Nikah Pro you can send Shaykh Rasoul a private question about marriage. It is read by Shaykh Rasoul and the small team that helps him choose and answer questions. They see your question, your first name, your age and whether you are a brother or a sister — not your photographs or the rest of your profile, and nothing that leads to it.

Nobody else sees your questions or his answers, and they are never shown in Ummah or anywhere public. A question nobody has answered within 7 days is closed.

Your questions and his answers are kept until you delete your account, and are included when you download your data.

Who can see what

You are only suggested to people whose age range, distance and non-negotiables you fit, and they are only suggested to you if they fit yours, with one exception. When somebody's week cannot be filled from inside their own age range and distance, and they have left “Show people just outside my preferences” on, the rest of it may come from people up to three years outside their age range or a little beyond their distance, labelled as such. Non-negotiables are never relaxed, and neither is anything you chose: you are only ever shown to people who fit your own age range, distance and non-negotiables. The setting is in Me › Preferences.

People suggested to you, and people you are suggested to, see your display name, age, city and country, occupation, the answers shown on your profile, what you wrote about yourself, and your photographs.

Your photographs are blurred to other people while “Photos blurred until Suhba” is on, which it is by default. The server sends only the blurred copy while that is on: the clear one is not sent to somebody and hidden by the app, it is not sent at all.

Your exact location is never shown to anyone. Distance is worked out from the city you chose and shown only as a rounded band, and only while “Show approximate distance” is on.

Your legal name, surname, date of birth, phone number, email address, the school you follow, and your live-check frame are never shown to another member.

Blocking is mutual and silent: a blocked person is not told, and neither of you appears to the other again anywhere.

Reports go to our safety team. Your name is not shown to the person you reported.

A request you send while your Suhba place is in use waits. The person it is for is not shown it until it is sent, and one never sent within 7 days is dropped without them knowing.

If you have Nikah Pro and leave “Let free members reach me” on, a free member who is suggested you is told they can send you a request because you have Nikah Pro, and a Suhba you accept from them opens in your place. Switch it off in Me › Subscription.

Our team can see accounts, profiles, photographs, answers, reports and stopped messages, to run the service and keep it safe. Everything they change on an account is recorded.

Who processes it for us

Supabase hosts our database, sign-in and file storage. Railway hosts our API and our face service. Resend delivers our emails: your sign-in codes, one welcome email when you join, and wali invitations. OpenAI runs iShaykh. Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging, with Apple’s push service on an iPhone, delivers notifications. They process this data on our instructions and for no purpose of their own.

Apple and Google handle signing in with their accounts, and take payment for Nikah Pro, under their own privacy policies.

The Know Yourself talks are YouTube videos played inside the app, so YouTube sees that they were watched, under Google’s privacy policy. Your phone’s own location service turns the city you type into coordinates.

Measuring our ads. We advertise Nikah.App on Facebook and Instagram. Only if you allow it (Apple’s tracking question on an iPhone, our own question on Android, asked once after your profile is live), the app tells Meta three things: that it was opened, that a profile went live, and that Nikah Pro was bought, with its price. With them Meta receives your phone’s advertising ID, IP address and basic device details, and may match them to a Facebook or Instagram account, under Meta’s own privacy policy. Meta never receives your profile, answers, photographs, messages or matches.

You can change your answer at any time: in Me › Settings › Ad measurement on Android, or in Settings › Privacy & Security › Tracking on an iPhone. If you say no, Meta is told nothing. There is no advertising inside Nikah.App, and nothing about you is sold.

How long we keep it

While your account exists. Pausing or hiding your profile keeps everything and stops you being shown.

Deleting your account removes your sign-in, your profile and answers, your photographs and their blurred copies, your live-check frame, your Know Yourself answers, your suggestions, your preferences, your blocks, your drafts, your Match Credits, your notification tokens, our record of your purchases, your iShaykh conversation and notes, your questions to Shaykh Rasoul and his answers, your wali invitations, your stopped messages, and your Suhbas with their messages — for the other person too. If you signed in with Apple, we also tell Apple to disconnect Nikah.App from your Apple ID. Your profile is hidden from everyone straight away, and all of this is erased 14 days later. Until then you can sign in and keep your account; once it is erased, it cannot be undone.

Deleting your account does not cancel a Nikah Pro subscription. Cancel it in your App Store or Google Play account settings, or the store goes on charging for it.

What stays: a line recording that the account was deleted and when, the record of what our team did to it, and any notes our team wrote about it, all identified only by its account number, so we can answer you if you write to us afterwards.

Reports you made, and reports about you, are kept after you delete your account, identified only by its account number, because they are part of somebody’s safety record.

If an account was banned, the records described under “Photos and faces” are kept after it is deleted, for as long as the ban stands. Lifting a ban deletes them.

What you can ask for

To correct almost anything: Me › Edit profile. Your legal name, date of birth and marital status cannot be changed in the app yet — write to salam@nikah.app and we will change them for you.

To be forgotten: Me › Settings › Delete my account. Without the app: nikah.app/delete-account.

For a copy of everything we hold about you: Me › Settings › Download my data, which writes the email to salam@nikah.app for you. A person gathers it and sends it within 30 days.

To stop notifications: Me › Settings, or your phone’s settings.

To object, or to complain to your data protection authority. Ask us first if you can bear to — it is usually faster.

Children

Nikah.App is for adults intending to marry. You must be 18 or older, and the sign-up refuses a date of birth under that. If we find an account belonging to a child we delete it.

Changes

If we change what we collect or who sees it, we will change this page and say so in the app before it takes effect.